> How in the world are you able to “just so” all this stuff?

I have a memory. (And my wife used to be an ICU nurse, in this particular case.)

https://www.uchealth.org/today/alcohol-withdrawal-in-hospita...

"For severe alcohol-withdrawal cases, hospitals often respond with heavy sedation, sometimes to the extent that the patient has to breathe through a tube on a ventilator."

Surely you can see how "more patients in ICU needing vents" would've been a problem?

(This is, incidentally, why experts are important. Liquor stores being essential businesses doesn't make sense to laypeople. Here, for example, is an article from April 2020 attempting to explain it; this info was out there! https://www.allrecipes.com/article/why-are-liquor-stores-con... But people prefer the uninformed dunk.)

> Boy at the time they seemed panicky and capricious. Wrong?

As Donald Rumsfeld once got mocked for saying, there are known-unknowns and unknown-unknowns. There were a lot of unknown-unknowns at the start of COVID. Sometimes they absolutely missed the mark. I'm still mad about them not prioritizing ventilation and better masks than cloth. But it was a period of mayhem.